Expired SSL Certificate Causes Microsoft Azure Outages

It looks like Microsoft has had its fair share of problems this week. Microsoft Azure, a cloud-based computer platform, suffered from outages yesterday beginning at 4:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. Though people could assume that it's because of the recent cyber attack Microsoft experienced, it unfortunately is just a case of a minor oversight. According to Microsoft, the outage that affected Azure was due to something as minor as an expired SSL certificate.

Someone accidentally forgot to renew the SSL Certificate for the service, which expires one year after it's renewal date, and thus caused outages throughout the entire Azure cloud-system. Over 52 different Azure services were offline or suffering from poor performance due to the SSL certificate expiring, which also shed some light on a similar outage that Azure faced back in August of 2012. The outage back then was caused by a similar system configuration mistake and left many users in Western Europe without access to the service.

Alongside the outages of Windows Azure, many users have also reported that they had issues with their Xbox's Music and Videos services. Users were unable to stream, download, or purchase products from the Zune Marketplace. While the Zune Marketplace is also based on a cloud-platform, Microsoft stated that the issues with Zune have no relation to the Azure outages.

Microsoft has restored the Azure cloud-platform today, but are still currently undergoing some tests. While users may have access to their information, Microsoft issues a warning saying that within the next 24 hours, they might see some disruptions to their service. Hopefully these outage issues don't become an annual thing with Microsoft Azure.

[via Microsoft]